Chapter 8
Eight
Ali
Faye and Ali didn’t eat the bagels Faye had procured. They were both too distracted, keyed up, and mesmerized by the box of stuff Ali had found.
Ali had gone up in the morning and found two more boxes. These were filled with expensive dresses, shoes, and bags.
“How in the heck did Mom afford this stuff?” Faye mused as they looked at the labels that read Miss Dior, Pucci, Geoffrey Beene, Halston, Von Furstenberg, and Evan Picone .
“No idea. I thought garage sale at first, but now? Well, they’re all size two or four, so it would be really, really lucky for her to be able to thrift all in her size.”
“And I mean, you’ve been to garage sales in Toledo. It’s usually lawn equipment and creepy dolls. Do you remember her wearing fancy stuff?” Faye asked.
“No, I remember her being pretty, smelling pretty, but not wearing anything that stood out in the neighborhood. Right? She was just my mom.”
After going through the dresses, Ali asked Faye if she wanted to look at the album.
Faye nodded, and the two of them sat side by side. The album had a green plastic cover.
This was why Ali had held back. If she was going to see her mother, she wanted to do it with her sisters.
At least one of them, anyway.
Ali carefully opened the cover. And there she was, Joetta Kelly, in lovely, petite blonde glory.
“Oh, that has to be you,” Faye said, pointing to the baby in Joetta’s arms.
“Wow, yeah, I’m sure. This looks very 1975, doesn’t it?”
Their mother had a big hairpiece coiled on her head. Blonde, glamorous, and probably way too flashy for Bruce Kelly’s vibe.
“Look at Dad, smiling. Wow, so he did know how,” Faye quipped.
“Yeah, at least in the 1970s,” Ali replied. And they laughed.
Their dad was handsome; she’d never thought of him that way. But in this yellowing photo, he clearly was. Maybe that’s how he landed their mom, his square jaw and fit physique?
They turned the pages; they saw a similar posed shot for each of the girls. They were at the front door, with the house behind them. These were the first day or week back home after the hospital photos.
It is easy to forget that there was a time, not so long ago, when photos cost money. Bruce Kelly didn’t have a camera that they knew of. What pictures they had back then must have been taken by someone else. And then he would have had to pay to have them developed. Ali had asked for a Kodak camera when she was in the fifth grade. She got it for Christmas.
“I’m taking photos of these photos right now to send to Blair.” Faye snapped them with her cell phone.
“Maybe wait a second. Let’s call her and warn her. We’re together and can help each other process, and she’s all by herself.”
“True, true,” Faye said. They turned another page.
They were around a Christmas tree.
And then another one.
“Oh my gosh!”
Faye was in diapers, and Ali was in a little red, white, and blue jumper. Their mom had both of them in her arms.
They turned the page again.
“What the heck is this ?” Faye asked.
The fire hydrant was decorated to look like a minute man. The top was a blue hat, the body red and white striped.
“It’s the bicentennial! Mom painted the fire hydrant like that. It was when I was a baby. Mom told me she did it.”
Memories were clicking into Ali’s mind. It was like a View-Master reel.
Click, Mom at the hydrant. Click, Mom, painting the bedroom. Click, broken glass. Broken glass?
“The fire hydrant that’s out there, now, yellow?”
“Yes.”
Click. Bruce, angry, painting over the minute man in bright yellow. Ali remembers crying then. Ali tried to tell her dad not to do that. She was more upset than when her mother died.
“Dad painted over it; I had forgotten all of that. He painted over it.” Ali wiped away a tear. Where was all this coming from?
“Bruce sure wasn’t one to let us sit in our feelings, was he?” Faye wrapped an arm around Ali, and for a moment, they both just processed the flood of memories and, worse, the lack of memories. It was hard to pin them down, these moments from their past.
Bruce hadn’t let them see any of this stuff.
“Why do you think he did this, kept it all from us?” Faye asked.
“Well, probably what you said. Maybe he thought it was the best way for us to get on with it, as Dad liked to say.”
“Right now, it is seeming rather cruel, don’t you think?” Faye said.
Ali shrugged. Maybe it was cruel. Maybe it was all their dad knew how to do. It might have helped solidify those slippery scenes that faded in their minds. This was Mom’s face, her hairdos, her hands. Ali had struggled to remember those things until she almost couldn’t anymore.
“Let’s give the photos a break—or maybe I need a break from them.” Ali was feeling overwhelmed, more so than even the day their dad died.
“Yeah, agree. The boring legal stuff will snap us out of this. Nothing like legal documents to sober a party up,” Faye said and reached for the pile of deeds.
Ali wondered about this propensity; they had to pull it together instead of crying. They were used to keeping their emotions under control. Did they know how to feel the grief that came with losing their parents? For sure, their dad did not want them to “cry like babies.”
Ali and Faye laid out the documents from the envelopes. She read them again, and still the words seemed preposterous.
“If I’m reading this stuff right, we, the three of us, at some point, owned land in Florida,” said Ali.
“Yeah, I mean, if Mr. Google is right, we had a nice spot on the beach. That would have been fun to know when I was looking for a place to go on spring break,” joked Faye.
“Ha, yeah. So, it’s probably nothing, but I haven’t found anything that shows Dad or Mom sold it off. So, either they don’t have the documentation in all this stuff or…”
“Ha, or we still own it,” Faye finished her thought.
“I highly doubt that, but we need the lawyers to look at it, I think. We need to be sure everything’s settled before we close out all of Dad’s stuff.” The estate had been straightforward up until this discovery.
“Agree. Did you call the lawyers?” They’d been using their dad’s long-time law firm, Michalak, Perne, and Janco.
“Yes, I did. Louie asked me to scan it and send it over after we looked at it. I’ll do that right after we dive into this. I think those dresses have value, so there may be something in there too that needs to be, uh, tallied.” Ali pointed to the jewelry box.
“Nothing to do but open it,” Faye said.
That was the last thing. The only thing they hadn’t cracked open yet.
“Well, you ready? Maybe the Hope Diamond is in there?”
“Yeah, right, maybe so,” Faye said.
But they understood each other. Finding all this had been like exposing their nerve endings. It was impossible to protect yourself from the past when it was now exploding all around them. And what they remembered didn’t match at all with what they were looking at.
A vibrant life, their mother’s, had ended too soon, and their father had decided to hide it all away from the daughters so desperately in need of some connection to her.
Ali was trying to suppress her anger. But she was mad at the man who’d done so much, so quietly, to keep their family together. Her anger had nowhere to land. Their dad was gone. Their mother, too. She rubbed her face with both her hands. She needed to reset to something less raw. Ali took a deep breath.
“Okay, open it,” Ali said.
Faye did as she asked, slowly.
The midday light from the kitchen window caught the contents of the jewelry box just right.
Sparkle, color, and even a strand of pearls made it seem like they’d opened a pirate’s treasure chest.
“Wow,” Faye said.
“Yeah, Joetta Kelly had a lot of bling.”
Bling was an understatement.